Chinese Video Game Using Facial Recognition To Monitor Its Players

Players of League of Legends, the American version of Honor of Kings. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green, File)

Chinese tech giant Tencentannounced that it will use facial recognition technology to monitor and identify players of its video game “Honor of Kings” in China. The game, also known as Wángzhě Róngyào and known as both "Kings of Glory" and "Arena of Valor" in the West, is a multiplayer online battle game and one of the most popular and highest grossing online games in China.

At the end of September, Tencent revealed that an estimated 1000 randomly-chosen gamers playing “Honor of Kings” will have their faces mapped and matched to their ID photos in China’s citizen database. This comes on the heels of a 2017 decision by the company to require real name credentials in order to log onto the online game and barring children under 12 years old from playing the game for more than one hour per day between the hours of 8 am and 9 pm (minors over 12 are restricted to two hours a day). The game also blurs the screen if it senses the face of a player getting too close to the screen.

The new regulations are in response to sharp criticism of the gaming industry and “Honor of Kings” in particular by the Chinese government. In August, China’s president Xi Jinping called out excessive screen time for the rapidly increasing rate of myopia (nearsightedness) in Chinese children and demanded video game companies take responsibility for their role. This followed a report in 2015 that found that nearly half the Chinese population over the age of 5 (or 500 million people) suffered from some sort of visual impairment.

Near-sightedness isn’t the only public health crisis China hopes to halt with their crackdown. In 2008, health officials declared gaming addiction a clinical disorder and in 2010 instituted a law to combat it. This spurred the creation of hundreds of treatment centers, some resembling military-style boot camps, many of which have been accused of using corporal punishment.

Like most emerging technologies that focus on identification and surveillance, this one has the potential to be abused. Tencent will need to protect its video feed from hackers who can watch players without their knowledge. And we should all think about the implications of normalizing surveillance. It would be wise to monitor exports of the game to make sure the surveillance technology does not become part and parcel of playing the game, which has hundreds of millions of users worldwide after its 2017 international launch. If we learned anything from the Wikileaks saga, it's that our governments are already employing surveillance technology in ways we didn't expect, and there's very little stopping them from expanding their reach in the name of national security.

I asked neuroscientist and policy expert Dr. Nicholas Wright, who specializes in the use of emerging technologies, about Tencent's use of facial recognition in their game and he reiterated concerns about just how valuable this data can be to companies:

As we all know from our everyday interactions with other people, human faces convey huge amounts of information to observers. As tech companies gather facial data timestamped to individuals’ decisions and reactions in this engrossing game, this facial data will provide a rich extra source of data on emotions – helping build better models to predict their future online or offline decisions. It’s another strand in the surveillance web, using the phones in peoples’ pockets.

In China, this new application of facial recognition could easily play into the developing social credit system and there’s no reason to think that the technology (in addition to the data it produces) won’t be handed over to the government.

The goal of the Chinese social credit system is to create a more trustworthy culture by rewarding those who act appropriately and punishing and humiliating those who don’t. Children will be given scores as well, all in the name of enhancing “the moral cultivation of the members of society.”

Citizens have already been rewarded for heroic acts, basic civic duties (such as paying bills on time), and taking care of the elderly. They’ve also been punished for shirking military duty, missing bill payments, and speeding. Penaltiesrange from blacklisting people from jobs, housing, and loans, to barring them from conspicuous consumption such as flying or riding in first class or staying at high-end hotels. The government has suggested that parents should even be barred from enrolling their children in pricey private schools if their “trustworthiness” is low enough.

The Chinese government strongly encourages market entities to provide differentiated services to seriously untrustworthy individuals. This will include those who steal money to play video games, log in with false credentials, sell adult gaming accounts to minors, and otherwise cheat the system for an extra hour of online play. When the facial recognition software is scaled up, more people will be caught cheating the system.

If Tencent’s system works and can be scaled up, the company will benefit from sharing the tech and the video data with the government (or potentially be punished for a lack of cooperation, which could cost the company billions of dollars and affect the scores of some of its higher-ranking employees). It would then join Chinese companies such as Sensetime, which sells its facial recognition software to local governments to help identify jaywalkers, and iFlytek, which provides voice-recognition to police bureaus in Xinjiang, where the government closely monitors the minority Uighur population.

A screen shows a demonstration of the cognitive level of a facial recognition software t the Mobile World Congress Shanghai in Shanghai, China. Photographer: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg

The strict regulation of video games in China has been a blow to tech companies developing new games following the transition of media control to the Communist Party’s Propaganda Department. In March, the Chinese government froze all new licenses for video games and there’s no word yet on when it might resume. Tencent lost roughly $16 billion earlier this year after China pulled the license for popular game "Monster Hunter: World," from game maker Capcom that was running on Tencent’s WeGame platform, citing unspecified consumer complaints.

The stifling of the gaming industry (despite China being the world’s largest gaming market) is part of a broader crackdown on cultural content. The People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, specifically called out "Honor of Kings" for not only being physically and mentally harmful but for “distorting values and historical views” with its fictional history.

China has also banned Tencent’s and other versions of Texas Hold ‘Em as well as chat room discussion of the games on Weibo and WeChat (gambling is illegal in China, but games got around that until this year by offering non-monetary rewards). Many video games that are licensed in China from outside developers have had to undergo content alterations and censoring prior to hitting the market.

While the newest regulations must feel like financial annihilation to Tencent’s shareholders, the company is so big that despite losing out on as much as $200 billion this year and undergoing a complete restructuring, it isn’t planning any large layoffs. In fact, it’s unlikely that China wants the $500 billion company to fail. When laying out the tenets of the social credit system, the Chinese government acknowledged that it “must encourage enterprises to innovate and support enterprise development.” After all, Tencent is welcome to make money in international markets without regulation.